


under the twin suns

by ephemeralblossom



Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Resilience, ToT: Extra Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-27 11:39:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8400256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ephemeralblossom/pseuds/ephemeralblossom
Summary: There are no guarantees on Tatooine; you can only grab what happiness you can, when it comes, and guard it jealously against the never-ending glare of the suns.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anaraine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anaraine/gifts).



Beru is born on Tatooine, a benighted desert planet baked by twin suns and home to Hutts, criminals, and the poor who try to survive in the margins between them. 

Beru is also born in-between. 

It’s becoming common on Tatooine these days, the doctor says, when Beru’s mother scrapes up enough money to take her baby to him. Maybe it’s some chemical or other, leaking up from one of the abandoned mines and contaminating the air. On other planets, scientists might have been hard at work identifying and addressing the problem; on Tatooine, it’s simply not a priority. It doesn’t affect Hutts – and perhaps they wouldn’t care anyway – so it won’t get fixed.

The doctor tells Beru’s mother to concentrate on raising a healthy child – hard enough for a poor woman on Tatooine. If Beru lives, never a given, they can worry about it later.

The only major long-term effect, the doctor adds as an afterthought, taking Beru’s mother’s money and showing her the door, is that Beru will be sterile.

There are many in-between kids on Tatooine, as the doctor implied, and Beru never feels out-of-place or shunned. It doesn’t affect daily life; and when she chooses, at age ten, to be a woman, her choice is accepted with little interest or fanfare from her peers. Her mother snatches spare moments for two weeks to sew her a dress to commemorate the occasion, and it is Beru’s favorite until it falls to shreds, bleached from the suns and patched in a dozen places.

Her mother calls her Beru Whitesun, for the white-gold of her hair (though it darkens in later years to a golden dun). They have nothing; but they have each other, and it is enough. Beru’s mother sings, her voice roughened by a life of toil but still sweet, and Beru learns shockingly offensive jokes from the criminal riffraff in the taverns, just to make her mother gasp and then double over laughing. Beru grows up thin and sharp, but loved and cherished.

When she falls in love with Owen Lars, she worries that her sterility might matter to him; they are of separate classes, she and he, and perhaps a moisture farmer will want children. She belongs to the hardscrabble life of the cities, and he is the son of a landowner. The Lars family isn’t rich – only the Hutts are rich – but they own their own land, and Cliegg Lars was able to raise the price to buy a slave he fell in love with. They do not go hungry. They can afford children.

Beru has gone hungry more times than she can count; she has worked since before she can remember. Now, falling in love with Owen, she sees a different life unfolding before her – still a hard one, still one on the edge of survival, but a life that unfolds beneath the sky instead of underground, a life in which hard work has the possibility of paying off, a life that does not mean breathing in the toxic mining dust from the abandoned mines, day after day.

It turns out that Owen doesn’t care about her being in-between. He likes children, but he knows how difficult it is to raise them on Tatooine, to protect them and feed them and raise them to adulthood. “Better this way, perhaps,” he says, kissing her. “It’ll just be you and me. No kids to worry about.”

“Just you and me,” Beru echoes, and rests her head on his chest.

She loses her mother two months later, another casualty to the abandoned mines. Many die from the lung disease, rotting from the inside out; at least Beru’s mother is one of the lucky ones, taken quickly by a cave-in during an opportunistic excavation for scrap. Her death means Beru can’t afford to keep their tiny rooms.

“Move in with me and Father,” Owen says – then, with gruff shyness, “Marry me.”

It isn’t a move without danger. Shmi’s kidnapping last year by Tusken Raiders reinforced what everyone knows: the Jundland Wastes are not a safe place. If she marries Owen and becomes a moisture farmer, perhaps Tusken Raiders will kill her tomorrow.

But if she stays in town, she might be knifed tomorrow for the shirt on her back. There are no guarantees on Tatooine; you can only grab what happiness you can, when it comes, and guard it jealously against the never-ending glare of the suns.

“Yes,” Beru says, and kisses Owen, sweet and sure.

***

Beru makes a good moisture farmer. It is hard on Owen, losing his father shortly after their marriage; Cliegg was never the same after Shmi’s kidnapping, physically or mentally, and Beru suspects his death is due as much to a broken heart as to the aftereffects of his injuries. Owen ages overnight, trying to compensate for the loss of his father’s labor and (more importantly) knowledge. They are truly ‘just you and me’ now, two people united in labor and love.

Beru learns about moisture farming in leaps and bounds, rewarding Owen’s less-than-patient teaching with kisses. Together they are getting by; but if the Tusken Raiders were to take Owen, or if he simply sickened or had an accident, Beru has to give herself a fair chance at survival. She is determined not to go hungry again. She will make this work.

And for all Owen’s grumbling about not being a teacher and about wanting to relax in the little spare time they have together, she sees how he takes pride in her learning. He is a kind man, and he loves her with a fierceness that makes her heart swell with affection. When you don’t have much, you cherish what you do have, and Beru cherishes Owen and his love above all else. They are a team, and she has faith that they will do the best they can.

That faith is tested two years after their marriage, when a fugitive and a baby arrive on their doorstep.

***

“We can’t take him,” Owen says, desperation in his voice. 

Kenobi has told them how the glowering boy she remembers has turned into a monster. He’s told them of the Jedi massacres, not sparing the grisly details. He’s told them how the Republic – distant from Beru and Owen’s lives, only dimly understood here on the Outer Rim – has fallen, replaced by a new Empire.

Beru thinks Kenobi is in shock; his hands shake, and she doesn’t think Jedis’ hands usually shake.

Will the Republic being replaced by the Empire truly matter to life on Tatooine? Neither will care about this forsaken dustbin of a planet, notable only for its criminal underworld and the Hutts that control it. Even its mines, the one tangible thing it ever tried to contribute to the galaxy, produced only metal that corroded, before being abandoned and left to poison the planet. Beru finds it hard to believe that the Empire will care one whit about Tatooine.

But Kenobi says that the baby in Beru’s arms is vital to the fate of the universe, in some huge way that she almost can’t comprehend. There are stories of life beyond Tatooine, tall tales spun by drunk travelers in the taverns. The children of Tatooine are warned away from the taverns – far too dangerous – but in a world with nothing, they always went anyway. Beru has fond memories of squatting in the dust, hearing tales of princesses and Jedi, fish-men and smugglers, starships and oceans, distracting the storyteller with her wide eyes and gasps of surprise while her friend Aina slit his moneybelt and slipped away.

A baby that’s the last hope for an entire universe – it sounds too fanciful to believe, too incredible for even the tallest of traveler’s tales. 

Luke sleeps in her arms, unbothered by the tension around him. She strokes his downy cheek.

“You have to take him,” Kenobi says, sounding just as desperate as her husband. 

“We’re simple folk,” Owen says. “I can’t protect him, if Anakin comes to kill him.”

Kenobi shudders, his eyes closing momentarily. “Darth Vader. Anakin is dead.”

“Whatever,” Owen says. “Whichever.”

Beru hasn’t held a baby in her arms since she was small, since she helped mind Aina’s little sister so that Aina’s mother could work. Luke is so tiny, so beautiful, so fragile. She is almost afraid that she will break him.

“I don’t think Vader will come here,” Kenobi says. “There’s nothing about Tatooine to interest the Empire, and Tatooine has painful memories for him. Since he doesn’t know Luke exists, he won’t be looking for him. There won’t be any reason for him to come to Tatooine.”

He sounds like he’s trying to convince himself as much as Owen and Beru. Perhaps he is.

“You don’t think,” Owen says, sarcasm heavy in his voice. “A lot to stake the kid’s life on. Not to mention our own.”

There is exhaustion in Kenobi’s every limb. “It’s his best chance.” 

Beru can see the fear in Owen’s shoulders. They have their tiny corner of the universe under control; they have enough to eat and a shelter from the suns. They have never aspired to more – and now here comes a tiny baby to throw it all into chaos. 

“Why can’t you just… hide somewhere else with him?” Owen asks. “There are other godforsaken planets on the Outer Rim, not just Tatooine.”

“Owen,” Beru says, the first time she’s spoken since this argument began. He automatically turns, and she sees him swallow at the sight of her holding the baby in her arms. “Master Jedi, would you please let us speak alone.”

Kenobi nods jerkily and steps outside into the dusk.

When they’re alone, Owen comes to her side. “I knew that Anakin was a bad lot,” he mutters, though she can see the softness in his face as he looks down at the baby. “Shmi was sweet, so maybe it was those Jedis that made him turn out rotten.”

“It would put our lives in danger to keep him,” Beru says. “They could come for him tomorrow. If you can’t live with that, then we’ll send him away.”

Owen’s face is shadowed. “It’s not the danger,” he says. “Tusken Raiders could come for us tomorrow too. But we can’t protect the kid. That Jedi out there could. Why does he want us?”

“We could do our best,” Beru says, softly. “Even if they do come for us eventually, we could give him a happy life until they do.” 

She thinks it must have been her mother’s mantra, raising a child in the slums. When you’re poor on Tatooine, thinking too far ahead is useless; today is all that matters. Putting food in your child’s mouth today, making them feel loved today, keeping them safe today. Tomorrow will take care of tomorrow.

Now Beru has a little more security, and a partner she not only trusts but loves. Can she refuse to extend that security and love to this little mite of a child, snuggled up against her in unconscious serenity?

“Do you want him?” Owen asks, just as softly. 

She hears the unspoken question behind the question. Unable to have children of her own, and always professing to be unbothered by that – has she secretly been longing all this time to be a mother?

“I was content to be childless,” she says. “I think it’s madness to give a hostage to fortune on this planet. But this hostage to fortune is already here.”

Owen reaches out to the baby, stroking a callused finger across his little balled fist. 

“I don’t want you to say yes if you aren’t sure,” she says, leaning against his shoulder. “It would change our lives to have a child, even before the danger posed by his evil monster machine-father.”

That makes Owen laugh, the sound rusty. 

The sound startles the baby, and he opens his eyes, blinking against the light. 

“Do you want him?” Owen asks again, as the baby’s little fingers curl around his thumb.

“Yes,” Beru says. 

“Then we’ll keep him,” Owen says, simple as that, and leans down to kiss her.

***

Beru doesn’t know how long the galaxy will let her keep her husband and her nephew. Any day the Empire might come; any day Tusken Raiders might swoop in on them; any day their life might come crashing down. 

But for now, she watches a grinning Owen swing Luke high in the air, making Luke giggle and squeal. For now, she sings Luke the gentle lullabies she learned from her own mother. For now, she and Owen help Luke take his first steps, encouraging him to toddle back and forth between them, as he laughs with excitement. For now, she takes joy in every meal that she serves, every time that they are full, loved, happy, and together.

Owen comes in, tracking dust, and Beru holds up her face to be kissed, as Luke barrels out of the bedroom to throw his arms around his uncle’s knees. 

“What’s for dinner?” Owen says, winking, then bends down to Luke. “Missed me, squirt?”

Beru doesn’t know what the future will bring. And that’s okay.

For every moment that she is given, she will love her family with all the love that is in her. That is what she can do, and that is what she will do.

She is Beru Whitesun, and she will live.


End file.
